Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

We wondered about the marketability of a book
about a modern day Noah, who shepherds

the dead out of New Orleans on a flotilla of small arks
when the meniscus ruptures and the storm surge climbs the levies

like a tentacled thing of Arcadian balladry. A galaxy, spilling into the parish
like a custodial sink left running during a tornado drill.

He reads coffee stains in china cups,
in the wine cellar of Brennan’s where he is the steward.

A man in scuba gear swims up to a window, looks in, and sees him
consulting the marks on the enamel and moves on.

The wine glasses lined up on the stone window ledges float,
and topple to the cellar floor.The driest things here are the damsel

flies and wasps that whisper in the shards as the water begins to slide in
slowly, all at once. Every street level window giving up a glass ghost in unison.

He’d watched Easyrider many times in Montreal. He always hated
the interminable scene in the New Orleans grave yard.

The instant brewed visions from the cup he now drops tell him
he always hated that scene because of this moment.

When the waters come in, he swims his way up the dumbwaiter,
breaking the tension in the deserted dining room, breast-stroking efficiently through

a field of piqued linen napkins, burgundy beacons looking for tables.
Chandeliers dip baubles in the Gulf. He will step from a second story window

into the new French Quarter—
the South having risen, at least 28 feet above sea level—

and swim for the warehouse where they store the canoes,
lash them together in phalanx and legion and gather the bodies
reconstituting in the warm city seas.

The blacks hail him from the curved parking lot of the Superdome roof.

They become like reindeer afraid to swim. He teaches them and they call
him Coach.

Two weeks later, with shoulders like mountain ranges, they swim
into the mouth of the Ohio Valley.

The papers say it must’ve been like watching the Spanish fleet
sail in to meet Nelson, if the Spanish fleet were manned by the dead
air drying in their finery, or something like that.